


it takes time, but time moves slow

by prettydizzeed



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Ableism, Academia, Access Intimacy, Author is disabled, Canon Disabled Character, Character Study, Chronic Pain, Developing Relationship, Disability, Interabled Relationship, M/M, author has chronic pain, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21609661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: Hermann conducts a cost-benefit analysis every class period of sitting in the back of the lecture hall versus walking down the stairs to the front. He wishes he had hard data for this, to get some actual statistics, and perhaps after a while, if he records his pain level and his ability to read the board and pay attention after each class, he will be able to predict the outcomes given either choice on a particular day.Two curves, traveling in opposite directions, inversely proportional: pain goes up, concentration goes down. It’s comforting, somewhat, to make it a numbers game. Impersonal. Absolute. Not a tragedy, and not his doing, only his to interpret, a smudged scrawl across his left knee in an unfamiliar handwriting, his to analyze, to decrypt.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler & Hermann Gottlieb, Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 22
Kudos: 134





	it takes time, but time moves slow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Princex_N](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princex_N/gifts).



> title is from "Patience" by Ren Gill, which is on the soundtrack for Unrest, a documentary available on Netflix about chronic fatigue syndrome
> 
> N's fic "and the punchline to the joke is asking SOMEONE SAVE US" (in the good omens fandom, about crowley having chronic pain) deeply affected me, and a lot of the directions i went with this fic were based on thoughts i've been having for the past few months after reading that
> 
> trigger warnings: Hermann refers to himself as a cripple once a little less than halfway through, in the context of "this is something other people think about me"  
> there is a mention of a fire towards the end of the fic; no one is injured and no property is destroyed, but the building is damaged

TU Berlin is massive. Hermann hates driving—it’s painful and stressful and never fails to put him in a bad mood—but he attaches the blue badge decal to the car window, puts the map of accessible parking spaces he printed from the disability services website in his glove box, and resigns himself to driving daily for the duration of his undergraduate education. In the same moment, he makes a promise to himself: he won’t be here long.

His father insisted on the Technische Universität, of course, and Hermann was not about to tell him that he froze immediately upon looking at the size of the buildings in the promotional photographs, that he has no idea how he will be able to walk to his classrooms even after parking next to the buildings themselves.

And if he ever has a day where he doesn’t trust himself to drive safely given his pain level, or where he has to take medication that morning, well. “We recommend to check if the elevators are working properly before traveling,” the disability services website says of the public transportation system in Berlin, so he bookmarks brokenlifts.org and swallows down a sob at the current count of 17 out of service. 

On the main campus, only 31 of 53 buildings have an accessible bathroom, and in only 14 of those buildings can the restroom be accessed without asking the facility manager for a key. He runs the numbers in his head quickly: 58.491% and 26.415%, respectively. There isn’t a grab bar in the bathroom in his flat, so between that and the campus situation, he masters the art of hefting himself to his feet by pushing off of the toilet seat by his third week in the city, bar the occasional close call where he almost falls on his bare ass on the bathroom floor. 

He conducts a cost-benefit analysis every class period of sitting in the back of the lecture hall versus walking down the stairs to the front. He wishes he had hard data for this, to get some actual statistics, and perhaps after a while, if he records his pain level and his ability to read the board and pay attention after each class, he will be able to predict the outcomes given either choice on a particular day. Two curves, traveling in opposite directions, inversely proportional: pain goes up, concentration goes down. It’s comforting, somewhat, to make it a numbers game. Impersonal. Absolute. Not a tragedy, and not his doing, only his to interpret, a smudged scrawl across his left knee in an unfamiliar handwriting, his to analyze, to decrypt.

He takes the stairs to the front every day for a month and calls it data collection, up until the day his knee buckles two steps down for the third class in a row and he finally acknowledges he hasn’t actually been processing anything any of his professors have been saying because he’s in screaming pain every class period. The numbers do not lie: it’s inefficient for him to continue attending class without comprehending anything, then playing back the lecture recordings at home every night and correcting his original notes, spending twice as much time on each lecture as his peers. 

So he sits at the back and learns how to project his voice just right when he asks a question so that the professor can hear him without him having to shout, and on good days (or at least less bad days), when he feels confident that he actually absorbed the material, he uses the time he used to spend listening to lecture recordings to make his papers that much better, to study for tests that much harder.

He cannot become a familiar face to his professors from the back of the room. He cannot drag his howling body across campus for his professors’ office hours when all his energy is gone just from getting to and from class. But he can lean against three pillows and work practice problems in his bed by lamplight. There must be a ratio, somewhere, for how to make that enough, a tipping point of time spent studying past which he will no longer be at a disadvantage, he will no longer be simply another name on the roster—one lugging his father’s last name alongside it, at that. 

Because when it comes down to it, he will not be a student here as long as his peers, and he will need the same number of letters of recommendation, and he is not about to be beaten by those odds.

*

He leaves his cane under a couch in the lobby during each interview for Ph.D. programs. He feels a bit awful about the whole thing, but he’d rather have his doctorate than pretend to be unapologetic about his body.

There are not any numbers available about the percentage of disabled people in STEM fields, much less engineering specifically, much less doctorate-level education programs, and that is a statement in and of itself, a truth he cannot afford to ignore.

*

His cane clatters to the floor from where it had been propped against his desk, and every single person in the room is staring, so he raises his hand and corrects the presenter’s equation, so that they are all rolling their eyes for an entirely different reason. 

Better to be the pretentious asshole than the pathetic cripple. 

He writes as much to Newton that night, and only remembers after sealing the envelope and dropping it down the mailroom slot that he has not previously mentioned his disability. He had been too caught up in the fury he is not allowed to express to anyone else, the isolation and humiliation he has a feeling Newton will understand.

 _That’s such bullshit oh my god man_ , Newton’s next letter reads, and Hermann flinches, Hermann wants to crumple to the floor, _I can’t believe they would treat you like that._

Oh. 

Oh. He needs a word stronger than relief.

 _I mean, I can, I guess, because if this life has taught me one thing it’s that people are DICKS, but god. Also none of them called you that right??? Because if it’s a reclamatory thing that’s totally cool but if any of those jackasses said it I would_ —— _I was gonna say break their kneecaps but I don’t want to like reinforce the stereotype of disability as punishment so. I would frame them for honor code violations or some shit._

_Wait, does the Jaeger Academy have an honor code?_

He needs a word less embarrassing than infatuated.

 _Of course there is an honor code,_ he writes instead of thank you, _You should be aware of that, seeing as you are also enrolled._

He writes thank you at the end anyway, right below his signature, disjointed and removed from all context. He does not need to run the numbers to know it is certain that Newton will know what he means.

*

“What’s wrong, man?” Newton asks, and Hermann does not deign to validate that blatant expression of unprofessionalism with a response. Instead, he neatly folds his rejected requisition form into fourths, tears it in half, and drops it into the garbage can.

Two weeks later, there is a circular blue and silver button attached to the wall outside the lab. Hermann presses the back of his palm to it, practically holding his breath, and the door smoothly glides open.

Newton, he is aware, regularly digs through the trash.

“How did—” Hermann begins, before he can stop himself, and Newton shrugs.

“Told them I’m covered in, like, toxic alien gunk half the time. It would be a safety hazard for me to smear my foreign lifeform juices all over the door handles any time I need to go grab something outside the lab.” He hesitates, not looking at Hermann, but evidently decides to continue. “It’s kinda bullshit, obviously, because we have a sink in here and all, but, you know. Just wanted to use my privilege or whatever.”

Hermann needs a word stronger than relief. The knowledge that he won’t have to struggle through his own door every morning and evening, won’t have to weigh bringing tea back from the mess hall versus the spectacle he will make of himself to get to his desk with it, and a thousand other daily cost-benefit analyses, familiar by now, habitual, is so overwhelming he could cry. 

So, naturally, he picks a fight about it.

*

When the war ends—when they save the world, as some would put it, namely Newton—there are photographers. Hundreds, it feels like, of people with cameras who either make very sure to keep his cane out of the shot, above the waist photos only, or ask can’t he just lean it against that wall over there for a bit, or try to _position_ it until he shouts that it is not a fashion accessory, it is a weight-bearing piece of medical equipment, or zoom in and trail their cameras down it in a way that makes his skin crawl. 

People are messing with Newton’s body, too, rolling his sleeves down and buttoning him up or zeroing in on his tattoos, depending on the photographer. It’s not the same, of course, far from it, but it makes Hermann feel less alone. 

*

It’s the things no one thinks about. Not even the ones they _should_ think about but don’t, like how there isn’t a button on the door of any building where he teaches a class, because that, at least, makes him angry. The rest just make him… sad. The bathroom is in the opposite corner of the first floor from his office. Ounces of recommended daily water consumption versus steps necessary to urinate; cost-benefit. Which would he rather wreck, his knees or his kidneys?

The building—the biology and chemistry building, which is where Hermann’s office is located because there is not an entrance without stairs to the physics and astronomy building—doesn’t have an elevator; he’s on the first floor, but he can never stop by to ask a question of any of his colleagues who do not share this floor, would have to call them and ask them to come to him, which he never does.

Newton comes to him anyway, uninvited but always, secretly, welcome.

His office is on the fourth floor of the same building as Hermann, which makes sense, since it’s the building for Newton’s actual field of study. So when Hermann steps outside the building to the blaring of alarms and sees smoke near the top floor, he fumbles for his phone and dials Newton’s number. 

“Hey, shit, I’m good, don’t worry,” he says as soon as he answers, “Attempt at using those relaxation candles went very wrong, but I think just the carpet’s fucked up, maybe one of the walls, it shouldn’t be a big deal.”

Hermann exhales a sigh of relief—or something stronger, something unnameable—before proceeding to lecture Newton on fire safety for half an hour. It would have been longer if the fire marshal had not cleared them to go back inside at that point.

“Glad to know you care,” Newton says, and Hermann can hear his smirk through the phone. He does not draw Newton’s attention to any of the number of reasons Newton already knew he cares, thank you very much. He does not ask why Newton needed to relax so desperately right now.

Two days later, Hermann is sitting outside of the administration suite awaiting the semesterly meeting about his course evaluations when he hears a very familiar, very loud voice coming from the university president’s office.

“Yeah, well, actually,” Newton is saying, and Hermann can picture his arms flailing wildly, his indignation as he jabs with one hand at the papers in the other, “remember this thing called the ADA? Yeah, turns out that’s still on the books, it didn’t just get totally scrapped during wartime the way people like you want to pretend. And within the ADA is the requirement that if you’re renovating part of a building after 1992, which, hmm, let me check my watch, yeah, we’re past that, you have to make the renovated section of the building accessible according to ADA requirements. So if, for example, you’re redoing the carpeting, walls, and ceilings on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator, boom, that floor needs to be accessible, put a goddamn elevator in or I’ll fucking sue your asses.”

It’s incredibly unprofessional. It’s also… incredibly touching. Hermann is more pleased than he is horrified, which is horrifying in and of itself.

He knows he wasn’t supposed to overhear any of this, so he slips out to the men’s room and washes his hands to kill time. There is no grab bar. 

When he returns for his meeting with the dean, the president’s door is shut, and several men can be heard arguing over numbers. Not for the first time, Hermann frowns at the issue of absolutes; numbers do not lie, yes, but what they appear to say changes based on what question you ask of them, what answer you hope to obtain. What your priorities are. And in Hermann’s experience, in a cruelness that feels unnecessarily personal (no matter how ridiculous and illogical that may be), numbers can be weaponized in ways that do not tell the whole truth. Dollars saved versus an equitable education, or the ability to do anything when he gets home other than heat up leftovers cooked in bulk over the weekend, collapse into bed, and flinch when his cane clatters to the floor. 

One of these, he knows, is a lot easier to quantify than the other. One of these calculations is given far more weight.

However—

Hermann has seen steeper odds collapse beneath Newton’s fury, or something stronger, something perhaps too close to looking like love.

Half of the biology and chemistry building is roped off for months while they install an elevator. Newton is already in it when Hermann steps in the first day it’s operational. Newton grins at him and asks what floor. 

“About fucking time, huh?” he says. “Maybe someone should accidentally drop some really heavy shit on the stairs to the physics and astronomy building, force them to put in a ramp.”

Hermann smiles softly. “Thank you, Newton,” he says.

Newton startles, then makes a valiant but failed attempt to recover. “I, uh. I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

“Be that as it may, I’m grateful,” Hermann replies, and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Newton smile. 

“So, what are you going all the way up here for, anyway?” Newton asks when the elevator lets them out on the fourth floor.

“Visiting a friend’s office,” Hermann says. “Just because I can. And also because someone has to make sure he doesn’t burn the place down again.”

Newton flushes, but he’s grinning as he unlocks his office door and holds it open for Hermann.

* 

Newton installs grab bars by the toilet in their new home.

He installs some by the shower, as well, and the kitchen sink has a cutout beneath it where Hermann can sit in a chair to wash dishes, and when none of the places in their price range within a reasonable distance of the university had a flat-level entrance, Newton said, “Fuck it, baby, would it work if I just built you a ramp?” and so he does, tosses his shirt to the side even though it’s sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit outside and that is absolutely unnecessary, just so Hermann will stare.

Which he does, even while telling him not to be an idiot, and after all this time, he isn’t about to lose him to catching his death of chill.

There’s a remote control for the lights and the fan and the thermostat, and when Hermann wrinkles his brow and says isn’t that a bit outside of our budget, dear, Newton just shakes his head and says happy anniversary, I love you, don’t sweat it, I may not have coded a jaeger but I can still throw some spare parts together.

There’s a little ring of metal in the wall by their bed that Hermann sets his cane through every night so they don’t wake up to it clattering on the ground. Then he turns out the lamp, turns on his side, drapes his arm across the man he loves, and falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> for any able-bodied people reading this who aren't familiar with these issues, every one of these experiences are something that has happened to me (most of them) or to a disabled professor at my school, aside from the renovations being due to a fire (it was asbestos removal).
> 
> also, the information about TU Berlin is from their disability services website, and the 17 elevators out of service in Berlin public transportation is from when i checked brokenlifts.org this morning. 
> 
> i'm on tumblr @campgender (main) or @crippleprophet (disability sideblog), feel free to come say hi!


End file.
